20 November 1873 • London, England (MS: CU-MARK, UCCL 00984)
Livy darling, it is close upon half past 9, now, the breakfast is on the table getting cold, & still you & Clara1explanatory note do not come. The Modoc amused me for a while with a distant sound, down the hall, of uncertain footstepsⒶemendation & “abundance of “Tah-tah’s” for benefits conferred by somebody out there—but she is gone, now, & I have nothing now but the mor Times, with Mr. Lord Rector Disraeli’sⒶemendation speech in it.2explanatory note I am not particularly hungry, but what I mind is the delay, & the lonesomeness of waiting. As far up Portland Place as I can see, the glittering Horse-Guards are filing in stately procession; out here on Langham Place that old “semi-detached” tooth-pick of a steeple stands up just as sharp & a ugly as ever;3explanatory note that same beadle is behind a pillar “laying” for a tramp who has half a mind to venture inside the iron railings; that same one-legged crossing-sweeper is coming around the circle of the railings, & is humping himself too, to help a lady into a Hansom; that very same Punch & Judy man has arrived with a tap or two of his drum, a toot or two of his pipes & a will wildⒶemendation, shrill remark from Punch himself;—& the show is moving on again, the man taking off his hat humbly & beseechingly to people in various Langham Hotel windows—to no purpose. These sights are things that you & Clara always liked, heretofore, but now you do not care for come. Well, I will breakfast alone, then. Bacon, coffee & poached eggs are hardly worth sharing, anyhow.
But I love you my sweetheart & would give a great deal to divide these refreshments with you & have your company.
Mrs Samℓ. L. Clemens | Forest street | Hartford | Conn. in upper left corner: America. | flourish postmarked: london-wⒶemendation zb no20 73 and li and new york dec ◇ paid all Ⓐemendation
Spaulding.
The renowned Conservative statesman and novelist Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) was installed as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow on 19 November. After the ceremony he gave a speech, reported in the London Times the next day, in which he asserted that two kinds of knowledge were important for success in life: an accurate understanding of one’s own character and abilities, and a comprehension of the “spirit of the age” in which those abilities would be exercised (“Mr. Disraeli at Glasgow University,” 20 Nov 73, 10).
All Souls Church in Langham Place, designed by John Nash and built in 1822–24, featured a “combination of a Greek peristyle and a spire,” which was “ridiculed at the time and the portly Nash was caricatured as impaled upon it,” in a drawing by Cruikshank (Weinreb and Hibbert, 19–20).
References
- University of California, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley
- Machlis, Paul, ed. Union Catalog of Clemens Letters. Edited by Paul Machlis. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. [In some cases, UCCL catalog numbers cited in this volume supersede those assigned in 1986 and reflect corrections or additions to the catalog since publication. An updated version of the catalog can be consulted via the Letters Search page at MTPO.] 1986
- SLC (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5: 1872–1873. Edited by Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith. The Mark Twain Papers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Also online at MTPO[bib32371]. 1997
- Wecter, Dixon. The Love Letters of Mark Twain. Edited by Dixon Wecter. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1949
- Weinreb, Ben, and Christopher Hibbert. The London Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan London. Citations are to the 1986 reprint edition, Bethesda, Md.: Adler and Adler. 1983
MS, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (CU-MARK).
L5 , 478–479; LLMT , 184.
see Samossoud Collection in Description of Provenance.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.